Mark Kermode, Observer film critic 

The Emperor’s New Clothes review – sporadically entertaining

Michael Winterbottom’s documentary about Russell Brand’s anti-capitalism campaign rarely rises above schoolboy levels of content and tone
  
  

emperors clothes review
Man on a mission: Russell brand in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Photograph: PR

Essentially an expansion of his “The Trews” (“true-news”, geddit?) YouTube series, Russell Brand’s sub-Michael Moore polemic finds the comedian-turned-activist failing to gain megaphone-waving access to the headquarters of major banks, with sporadically entertaining results. His bullet points are simple, nay simplistic – wealth inequality is bad, tax-dodging sucks, and you’re more likely to go to jail for small-scale benefit fraud than the wholesale pillaging of the economy. Highlights include Brand turning up at the house of “non-dom” Lord Rothermere and establishing that he does appear to “dom” here after all. Low points include Brand indulging in the kind of luvverly chummy man-of-the-people shtick that is the stock in trade of the very politicians he dismisses. A group of lively schoolkids are enlisted to help illustrate the unfair distribution of wealth in a sequence that nails the film’s classroom tone.

 

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